The American Presidents

President Joseph R. Biden Jr On a chilly January afternoon in 2021, amidst profound national turmoil, Joseph R. Biden Jr. stood on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, placed his hand on a hefty family Bible held by his wife Jill, and took the oath of office to become the 46th President of the United States. The scene was starkly different from inaugurations past: the National Mall was largely empt...

President Donald J Trump On the evening of November 8, 2016, Americans and the world looked on in astonishment as the election results defied almost all expectations. Donald J. Trump—a billionaire real estate mogul and reality television star with no prior political office—was declared the winner of the U.S. presidential race. It was one of the most extraordinary political upsets in American histo...

President Barack Obama On the night of November 4, 2008, tens of thousands of people gathered in Chicago’s Grant Park, their breath visible in the crisp autumn air, united by a shared moment of history. Barack Obama—son of a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother—walked onto the stage, having just been elected the 44th President of the United States. He was the first African American ever to claim the...

President George W Bush George W. Bush had been President of the United States for less than a year when the course of his tenure was transformed in a single morning. On September 11, 2001, as the sun rose into a clear blue sky, Bush found himself confronting the worst terrorist attack in American history. The nation watched as he learned of the attacks in a Florida classroom, a moment of dawning...

President Bill Clinton On a humid August night in 1963, a teenage boy from Hope, Arkansas, stood in the East Room of the White House and shook hands with the President of the United States. John F. Kennedy looked thinner and more fragile than he did on television, but to the seventeen-year-old Bill Clinton he seemed like the living embodiment of possibility—youth, ambition, public service bound to...

President George H. Walker On a cold January morning in 1989, as Marine One skimmed low over the Potomac River and settled onto the South Lawn for the last time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, George Herbert Walker Bush stepped out into the crisp winter air and paused. For eight years he had been the loyal vice president, the former rival who swallowed his pride and joined the ticket, the man stand...

President Ronald Reagan On a cold January afternoon in 1981, as the temperature hovered below freezing and a sharp winter wind cut across the National Mall, millions of Americans watched a moment that felt like the breaking of a long fever. The country had endured years of inflation, oil shocks, hostage crises, and a grinding sense of decline. Faith in government had sunk to levels unseen since th...

President Jimmy Carter On a warm January afternoon in 1977, as the inaugural procession wound slowly along Pennsylvania Avenue, a new president broke with decades of tradition. Instead of riding in the armored limousine provided for him, he stepped out with his wife Rosalynn, took her hand, and began to walk. The Secret Service bristled in panic; agents flanked him tightly. Spectators surged forwa...

President Gerald Ford In that moment, many Americans saw Ford for what he essentially was: not a visionary or an ideologue, but a decent, straightforward man who had been dropped into the presidency almost by accident and was now trying to steady a battered system. To understand who he was and what kind of presidency he offered in the wreckage of Watergate, you have to go back to a much messier, m...

President Richard M. Nixon Richard Nixon’s presidency begins, in most people’s minds, with an ending: a man in a dark suit stepping onto a helicopter on an August morning in 1974, giving a stiff, awkward double V-sign, and flying away from the White House he had just resigned in disgrace. The rotor wash blows across the South Lawn; aides stand watching, some stunned, some grim. It is the first tim...

President Lyndon Baines Johnson On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, aboard Air Force One on the tarmac in Dallas, a heavyset man in a dark suit raised his right hand while his left rested on a small Bible. His face was set, grave, exhausted. Beside him stood Jacqueline Kennedy, still wearing her pink suit stained with the blood of her husband, the president who had been shot barely two hours ea...

President John F. Kennedy On a bright November morning in 1963, the motorcade moved slowly through downtown Dallas. The sky was clear, the air crisp, and the crowds thick along the sidewalks. People leaned out of office windows, waved small flags, and craned for a glimpse of the young president whose face they knew from television. In the open limousine, John Fitzgerald Kennedy sat beside his wife...

President Dwight Eisenhower On a raw January morning in 1953, as a cold wind cut across the National Mall, a former five-star general stood on the podium of the Capitol, hand on a Bible, about to become president of the United States. Dwight David Eisenhower—“Ike” to practically everyone—was sixty-two years old, broad-shouldered, with the square, reassuring face that had stared out from war poster...

President Herbert Hoover On the night of March 4, 1929, as the festivities of Inauguration Day faded and Washington’s elite drifted from ballroom to ballroom, Herbert Clark Hoover sat for a quiet moment in the Red Room of the White House, staring into a vase of white roses. The celebrations had been grand: bands, parades, speeches, dignitaries—all hailing the nation’s new president, a man whose li...

President Calvin Coolidge In the summer of 1923, a small, spare bedroom in a Vermont farmhouse filled with the soft, uneven glow of lamplight. Outside, the village of Plymouth Notch slept under a sky pricked with stars. Inside, a middle-aged man in a simple nightshirt stood at attention beside the bed where his father, John Coolidge, a notary public and storekeeper, held an open Bible. A telegram...

President Warren G. Harding On a humid July evening in 1921, the new President of the United States leaned back in the upholstered seat of a White House car rolling slowly up Pennsylvania Avenue. Warren Gamaliel Harding had just delivered a speech titled “Not Heroes, but Partners,” praising the teamwork required to rebuild a nation emerging from war. Crowds lined the sidewalks, many of them smilin...

Woodrow Wilson was born into a world divided and left it even more fractured, yet forever changed by his vision. Few American presidents are as contradictory, as intensely moral and yet as blinkered, as the twenty-eighth president. He was a Presbyterian minister’s son who preached politics as if it were a sermon, a scholar who dreamed of remaking the world through ideas, and a Southern-born progre...

President William Howard Taft William Howard Taft moves across the American story like a large, courteous ship that prefers deep water to spectacle. He is remembered in cartoons as girth and in footnotes as an asterisk—only man to be both president and chief justice—but the truth is more intricate: he was a craftsman of institutions, a temperament tuned to law and procedure in an epoch that reward...

President Theodore Roosevelt He begins as a small boy fighting air and time. The asthma comes at night like a thief and sits on his chest; the child hears the rattle of his own breathing and learns, much earlier than most, that life does not hand out strength—it must be built. In a brownstone on East 20th Street, in a house that smells of books and leather and ocean salt carried in on his father’s...

William McKinley William McKinley enters American history with the light behind him rather than in his face: a small-town son with a soldier’s steadiness, a lawyer’s patience, and a politician’s ear tuned not for applause but for the faint crackle that runs through a country when prosperity is possible again. He is born in Niles, Ohio, in 1843, into a household that believes work is a sacrament an...

Stephen Grover Cleveland Grover Cleveland’s reputation begins with a sentence he repeats so often it stops sounding like a slogan and starts sounding like a moral reflex: public office is a public trust. The phrase is spare, almost severe, and it reflects a sensibility forged not in salons or at universities, but in parsonages, law offices, and municipal chambers where the nearest romance is the r...

Benjamin Harrison Benjamin Harrison arrives in American history with a paradox stitched neatly to the inside of his coat: a quiet man descended from noise. He is the grandson of a war hero president who died too soon to do much harm or much good, the son of a congressman with a frontier’s sense of town duty, and himself a lawyer whose sentences are careful at the edges and firm in the middle. He g...

Grover Cleveland’s reputation begins with a sentence he repeats so often it stops sounding like a slogan and starts sounding like a moral reflex: public office is a public trust. The phrase is spare, almost severe, and it reflects a sensibility forged not in salons or at universities, but in parsonages, law offices, and municipal chambers where the nearest romance is the romance of balancing a col...

Rutherford B. Hayes enters national memory under gaslight—calm voice, careful eyes, a lawyer’s temper tucked into a soldier’s frame—and for more than a century the shorthand that follows his name is a quarrel about legitimacy. The most contested election in American history lifted him into the presidency by a whisker measured in affidavits and midnight negotiations; the story’s machinery is so noi...

Ulysses S. Grant enters American life as a contradiction that grows truer the closer one looks: shy but unflinching, ordinary in bearing yet relentless in execution, a man who disliked blood and became the general who ended the bloodiest American war, a president whose name is still dragged through the mud of scandals and still stands under the clean architecture of civil rights written into law a...